[OSM-dev] Rendering of "surface"

Andy Allan gravitystorm at gmail.com
Fri Jun 3 12:05:04 BST 2011


On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 11:47 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:

> In my town, there are only a few dirt roads, but knowing if a road is
> dirt of paved is important to normal people looking at maps.   So I think
> the default rendering should show roads
> (highway=primary/secondary/tertiary/unclassified/residential/service)
> that are marked unpaved.  Probably more can be done, but just making the
> casings dashed on those would be a large fraction of the benefit without
> much downside.

Let's not start discussing the cartographic merits of different
approaches to showing different features on the main layer - everyone
will have their opinions, opinions are just that, and experience shows
that nobody has ever asked for their pet interest to be *removed* from
the main layer... :-)

Perhaps we have a problem with using trac for
subjective-enhancement-requests. I know I have the same problem with
the opencyclemap rendering suggestions I receive - there's lots there
that I'm unlikely to get around to ever, and if I do it's
realistically not on my priority list for the next few years. I could
WONTFIX them but that doesn't convey the right meaning really.

Perhaps the main problem we have is with "one running instance"
issues. Most opensource projects work well where, when push comes to
shove, you can fork it and add your own improvements and be happy. But
with some of our projects - the main map layer and the rails_port, for
example - people are only interested in the "one running instance",
and that leads to various tensions. For the mapping I encourage as
many people as possible to make their own styles, and as many
organisations as possible (wikimedia, OSM-DE etc) to run tileservers,
and for as many of these to be shown on the main page as possible. For
potlatch2 I encourage people to run their own custom instances rather
than having the osm.org one do everything.

That still doesn't address the issue of whether to WONTFIX the
original ticket, but if anyone knows of other map styles that takes
the surface key into account then adding the details to that ticket
will help relieve the tension about whether or not the main layer
happens to have such-and-such a feature added.

Cheers,
Andy



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